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Batch Virtual Appliance

High-Level Summary

This release contains improvements to telephony models for English and Spanish, and a number of bugfixes.

The following languages now support advanced punctuation: English (en), German (de), Spanish (es), French (fr), Dutch (nl) and Danish (da).

It is recommended that customers on previous releases upgrade to this version.

Important Notices

The legacy V1 API that the Batch Virtual Appliance currently supports will be discontinued in a future release as we align the product with the same V2 API used by the Speechmatics SaaS: https://asr.api.speechmatics.com/v2/docs. We recommend that customers familiarise themselves with the configuration object used to specify job configurations, and only use form parameters for callback notifications. Future notices will be provided to announce the end of life of the V1 API, and provide detailed instructions on migrations to the V2 API.

What's New

  • Improvements to the telephony models for English and Spanish

Issues Fixed

The following issues are addressed since the previous release:

Issue IDSummaryResolution Description
REQ-7268The internal 'reset' method can cause a server panicThis messages will now no longer be seen in the logs when services are restarted.
REQ-7461Memory leak affecting licensing containerA small memory leak affecting the licensing service has now been addressed.
REQ-9122Appliance could run into problems with services not being able to restart if it ran out of disk space.The appliance will now reject jobs if there is < 250MB of free space on the disk.
REQ-9569Unfriendly error when empty audio file is submittedIt is now possible to submit zero length audio files.
REQ-10095StopIteration Exception in post processing can cause a job to failThe exception is now handled properly.
REQ-11644Offline activation cannot generate deactivation codePreviously if you submitted the PUT/POST request for offlineactivation, any attempt to deactivate with a DELETE request failed; this has now been fixed.
REQ-11728Files less than 1 second skip decoding.Files that are < 0.3s long are considered to be zero length; but files between 0.3 and 1.0s (and above) will now be transcribed (assuming speech is detected in them).

Known Limitations

The following are known issues in this release:

Issue IDSummaryDetailed Description and Possible Workarounds
REQ-1409Proteus HCL with <unk> causes out of memory errorA custom dictionary list that contains the word '' causes the worker to crash.
REQ-7549Memory leak affecting gRPCThere is a small memory leak in the gRPC Python server (https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/5913).
REQ-10160Advanced punctuation for Spanish (es) does not contain inverted marks.Inverted marks [ ¿ ¡ ] are not currently available for Spanish advanced punctuation.
REQ-10627Double full stops when acronym is at the end of the sentenceIf there is an acronym at the end of the sentence, then a double full stop will be output, for example: "team G.B.."
REQ-111353.2.0 introduced unwanted hesitations in transcripts for English (en).Due to changes in the way that training data is now ingested to improve the accuracy of spontaneous speech for English (en) there is a greater likelihood that hesitations will be included in the output transcrtips. We plan to support a hesitation filtering capability in a future release for customers that do not want to see hesitations on transcripts.

Supported Platforms

Virtual Appliance image (OVA) for installation on:

  • VMware ESXi 6.5+ or VMware Workstation Player.
  • VirtualBox 5.2+
  • Amazon EC2

See the Installation and Admin Guide for details on the minimum specifications for the VM. The maximum number of concurrent jobs (maxworkers) that you can run on a single appliance is 32.

Form Factors

There are four variants of the Batch Virtual Appliance.

VariantImage SizeMax. Disk SpaceLanguages
nano13GB40GBen
mini21GB40GBen, de, es
midi41GB60GBen, de, es, fr, ko, ja, nl, pt
maxi65GB80GBen, de, es, fr, ko, ja, nl, pt, it, da, pl, ca, hi, ru, sv

Upgrade Path

Remove the license from your old appliance (see the Admin Guide), then re-import the new OVA and configure networking as per the Installation and Admin guide. You will need to re-apply the license code you have once the OVA has imported.

Installation

Upload the OVA to VMWare ESX, VMWare Workstation Player, or VirtualBox. See the Installation and Admin Guide for more information.